Neil DeGrasse Tyson held an “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit yesterday: I am Neil deGrasse Tyson — AMA (probably too late to ask him why some fields have endless golden ages and others have short ones, but you can read the answers and comments).

Many great and funny answers, but my favorite answer is this one (especially relevant for those trying to figure out what to think about Steve Jobs):

You should chose your heroes a-la carte. Picking and choosing from one and then another, thereby assembling a kind of composite hero. That way when you discover something reprehensible about any one of them it matters nothing to you because that’s not the part of them that piqued your interest.

By the way, Reddit was founded by two UVa students — Steve Huffman (BSCS 2005) and Alexis Ohanian (COMM 2005). They also founded Hipmunk, the best travel search site on the web.

The New York Times has an article about John McCarthy.
(The title, John McCarthy, 84, Dies; Computer Design Pioneer, which I’m sure wasn’t written by John Markoff who wrote the article which is excellent, is a bit misleading. McCarthy was a pioneer in artificial intelligence and programming language design, but not a computer designer. He did a great deal to make computers more useful and exciting.)

This article, A deeper law than Moore’s?, in The Economist, 10 October 2011, reports on an analysis that shows the computing power available for a fixed amount of energy has been approximately doubling every 1.6 years since the mid-1940s.